Ethics Newsline®

LONDON
In the last few weeks, Europe’s fabled shift toward the right has gained new momentum. Not surprisingly, news commentators tend to see this phenomenon in political terms. In fact, there’s a disturbing moral issue at stake here as well. Here’s why.

Last month, France was dumbfounded when the presidential candidate of the ultra-right National Front, Jean-Marie Le Pen, drew so many votes in the pre-election runoff that he, rather than the Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, ended up on the final ballot. Mr. Le Pen was roundly quashed in the final election by President Jacques Chirac, but only after causing the typically introspective French to plunge even deeper into national soul searching about why Le Pen was so popular. The principal reason: In a country flooded with immigrants, Le Pen played the anti-immigration card very skillfully.

Hardly had that election ended when Dutch voters were shocked by the assassination of their rightist candidate, Pim Fortuyn — the first political murder in their peaceable country since the seventeenth century. Though campaigning was halted, the election went forward, sweeping right-of-center parties into power and pushing Mr. Fortuyn’s new party up into second place. His central theme: It’s time to end immigration, especially among Muslims.

Europe’s rightward lurch, however, didn’t begin with Le Pen and Fortuyn. In Austria, the xenophobic Jörg Haider took 27 percent of the vote in the last general election, while in Italy the right-wing Silvio Berlusconi, a media mogul, is now prime minister.

If this rightward shift were rooted in sound economic argument, it would have fewer moral overtones. But Europe isn’t debating the virtues of individual economic initiative (classic conservatism) as opposed to a state-sponsored redistribution of wealth (classic liberalism). This new trend is, quite simply, a lurch toward racism, aimed at the immigrants who are daily making Europe more multicultural. Europe is generally feeling discomfort about immigrants — and making immigrants feel uncomfortable.

At its most virulent, under Le Pen’s banner, this new bluntness about immigrants seems to have been seethed in the same nationalistic pot as the rancor of Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia’s deposed tyrant. Whatever the form, it comes down to a dislike of “them” because they’re not like “us.”

That’s often difficult for Americans to see. Everyone in the United States, except its Native American population, is descended from “them.” What’s in danger of decaying across Europe is a core moral value — respect for others — that appears to show up in every culture around the world. At its most basic level, respect is fundamentally moral — so much so that those who behave without it, even though they reflect such other core values as responsibility or honesty, are deservedly described as “unethical.”

This sense of respect is one of the principal measures of a society’s moral health. The measure of greatness of any culture is not how well it treats “us” but what it does with “them.” The moral progress of a nation, in fact, can be charted by measuring the expansiveness of its moral boundaries. Even America, a nation of immigrants, had to fight its own civil war over the boundary that kept African Americans outside the circle of moral concern. It then had to fight another sort of battle to stretch the boundary to include women. And it’s still battling over a literal boundary with Mexico, and the extent to which it will grant full moral respect to those of Latin American descent.

This latter set of issues — those raised by immigration — probably constitutes the most pressing moral-boundary question of our time. In a globalizing age, that’s not surprising. The speed of market transactions accelerates the pace at which rich nations get richer. The media makes plain to poor nations the disparity between themselves and their wealthy neighbors. And global transportation makes it possible and affordable for citizens of poorer nations who have any get-up-and-go to get up and go elsewhere. Naturally, they head for the more prosperous nations, including Europe and America.

This rightward drift, then, may be no mere blip. It appears set to be a long-term trend, and one that will get more intense. Politics can help. So can stronger, fairer immigration laws, potent anti-crime efforts, and strict enforcement. But at bottom the issue is a moral one. Just what do we think of others? How large is our moral boundary? Can we really express a sense of respect to those unlike us? Can we build a nation whose moral boundaries are so large that no one is left out?

We can address these questions morally and ethically. Or we can watch as they are addressed xenophobically and frenetically by the Le Pens of this world. The choice is ours.

(c)2002 by the Institute for Global Ethics